A new hope … ehm i mean toy

I bought a neat eat toy for me. An A600 already equipped with an Vampire processor card. A Vampire is an FPGA based CPU card for Amiga 500 and Amiga 600. A while ago I thought already about to buy a Vampire card. The delivery times for it are very uncertain and seems in the order of 6 Month. I even would need to buy an A600 first, I was really to lazy to do such step with uncertain future. But I found an ready to use one one ebay. Maybe a little bit more expensive but thats fine by me, still much cheaper than a 68060 or PPC card. 😉 The capacitors are exchanged but the audio sounds strange, but not a big problem for me. Mainly I’m not interested in the speed but but in the GFX Card which comes with the FPGA on Vampire. Its the only way to get a 24bit GFX card into a keyboard Amiga (except the very seldom BVision for A1200). Of course my for me very interesting if freepascal and it’s programs work with it and good news on this side, it’s working nicely. The only problem (like on my A1200) is the slow harddisk which makes it much slower then UAE but as I read the next firmware should improve that a lot. Of course a screenshot (done with a screenshot program I wrote in FP-IDE directly on my A1200 some weeks before)

As I said speed is not my primary aim, but the speed is ok, not more or less. I mean it’s a little bit faster than my 68060/50 Mhz (maybe double speed) So a nice step but no revolution. The Graphic card is really nice, at least it feels faster than the CyberVision3D (and provides higher resolutions and clearer picture). Main problem stays the slow hard disc speed around 2 MB/s but it seems with next Firmware it should be improved. It really could improve the usability (and fpc compilation speed).